William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1564. The date of his birth is unknown but is celebrated on 23 April, which happens to be St George's Day, and the day in 1616 on which Shakespeare died.

Aged eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. They had three children. Around 1585 William joined an acting troupe on tour in Stratford from London, and thereafter spent much of his life in the capital. By 1595 he had written five of his history plays, six comedies and his first tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. In all, he wrote thirty-seven plays and much poetry, and earned enormous fame in his own lifetime in prelude to his immortality.

James Graham is a multi award-winning playwright and screenwriter.

His play This House gained critical acclaim, enjoyed a sell-out run at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2013 and its 2017 West End revival was Olivier-nominated. It was chosen by popular vote as the best play of the 2010's by Methuen Drama.

James created theatre history when his two plays Ink, about the early days of Rupert Murdoch, and Labour of Love, a romantic political comedy, played in theatres next to each other in the West End in 2017. James won an Olivier award in 2018 for Labour of Love and Ink transferred to Broadway in 2019, receiving six Tony award nominations.

James' play The Vote (Donmar Warehouse) aired in real time on TV in the final 90 minutes of the 2015 polling day and was BAFTA-nominated. His most recent television film, Brexit: An Uncivil War (Channel 4/HBO) is nominated for a 2019 Emmy Award.

Ben Jonson (1572 or 1573–1637) was born in London. A prolific poet, playwright, and contemporary of William Shakespeare, many of Jonson’s plays were performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men company. Married to Anne Lewis in 1594, the couple enjoyed some influence in London and Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1616, Jonson collected his entire works for publication in a single volume—something that had never been done before—and was made poet laureate that same year, for which he was given a pension by King James I.

Geoffrey Chaucer known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to be buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten-year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde. He is best known today for The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer was a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin.  

John Fletcher has been an Early Medieval reenactor for sixteen years, with much of that being focused on recreating life in 8th-11th century Cornwall and Devon. He runs the Facebook page 'Morvleydh', and gives talks on the emergence of the Cornish state. He has a Bsc in Environmental Sciences and focussed his dissertation on how climate change impacted Early Medieval settlement on Dartmoor.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) was an English playwright and poet, who through his establishment of blank verse as a medium for drama did much to free the Elizabethan theatre from the constraints of the medieval and Tudor dramatic tradition.

His first play Tamburlaine the Great, was performed that same year, probably by the Admiral's Men with Edward Alleyn in the lead. With its swaggering power-hungry title character and gorgeous verse the play proved to be enormously popular; Marlowe quickly wrote a second part, which may have been produced later that year. Marlowe's most famous play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, based on the medieval German legend of the scholar who sold his soul to the devil, was probably written and produced by 1590, although it was not published until 1604. Historically the play is important for utilizing the soliloquy as an aid to character analysis and development.

The Jew of Malta (c. 1590) has another unscrupulous aspiring character at its centre in the Machiavellian Barabas. Edward II (c. 1592), which may have influenced Shakespeare's Richard II, was highly innovatory in its treatment of a historical character and formed an important break with the more simplistic chronicle plays that had preceded it.

Marlowe also wrote two lesser plays, Dido, Queen of Carthage (date unknown) and The Massacre at Paris (1593), based on contemporary events in France. Marlowe was killed in a London tavern in May 1593. Although Marlowe's writing career lasted for only six years, his four major plays make him easily the most important predecessor of Shakespeare.

John Webster, MA, Vet MB, PhD, DVM (Hon), is a retired Professor of Animal Husbandry at the University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. He established the Bristol Unit for Study of Animal Welfare and Behavior and is a founding member of the UK Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC). Published as a part of the prestigious Wiley Blackwell - UFAW Animal Welfare series. UFAW, founded in 1926, is an internationally recognized, independent, scientific, and educational animal welfare charity.

Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and The Art of Seduction (both from Profile), has a degree in Classical Studies and has been an editor at Esquire and other magazines.

He is also a playwright and lives in Los Angeles.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the pre-eminent poet of his day, and is most famous for his mockheroic poem The Rape of the Lock. With John Gay, Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, he formed the Scriblerus Club

William Alexander studied theatre and folklore at Oberlin College and English at the University of Vermont. He currently lives, writes, and teaches in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

His short stories have been published in many magazines and anthologies. Goblin Secrets is his first novel.